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Sunday, 22 August 2010

Even though it's unlikely I'll be running a Labyrinth Lord campaign any time soon, I just couldn't resist buying the books. And I'm so glad I did! I've read the rules before in the PDF versions, but somehow having them in real physical form, and littered with gorgeous artwork, just takes the whole thing to another level of appealingness.

I've had some thoughts on what an LL campaign would look like if I were to run one, which have been further inspired by seeing the amazing Black Death film yesterday. In brief, I'd very much like to emphasise the battle between the alignments - Law, Neutrality and Chaos, and even envisage a plausible justifcation for alignment languages... I'll write more about that idea another time.

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Hirelings and henchmen play a significant role in old-school D&D, and I wanted to encourage their use in my Savage Worlds campaign. I thought this was an especially good idea due to the Savage Worlds system being able to so smoothly handle large numbers of characters in combat. However, unfortunately I couldn't find any details in SWEX or the Fantasy Companion relating to the hiring of allies - not even a rough "cost per day / week". So I worked out my own tables, specific to fantasy settings, with guidelines for the costs of locating and hiring mercenaries and neophyte adventurers to join a party.

It includes a random table for determining an adventurer's profession (Fighter, Wizard, Thief, Cleric, etc), and stats for them all. All the adventurers' stats are created with 5 points in Attributes, 10 points in Skills, and no Edges except those granted by racial background. So they're a step behind starting PCs, which is appropriate.

At present there are no guidelines or tables for hirelings' background, personality or motivations. The table in SWEX can provide a basic hint at personality, but I'd like to add some tables with small snippets of background, motivations and interesting quirks or features. A simple roll on the Minor Hindrances table could add some flavour as well.

The document is somewhat idiosyncratic to my campaign, with a setting-specific list of deities for Clerics, and the assumption that all Elves have supernatural powers. These things can easily be ignored though.